National Convention

Upcoming Events & Appearances

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“If we are honest — and scientists have to be — we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet.”

“He was an activist to the end of his life. He just did not believe that religion should enforce its views on the whole of society. He really believed that everyone should have the right to choose their own views.”

“The key to understanding who and what we are is that our futures, as individuals, societies or cultures, are not fixed or pre-ordained by some hidden hand of god; that what will become of us depends in part on what we choose to become.”

“The political climate in our house was generally and loosely left: it was unthinkable that a Jew, our sort of Jew, the artisan Jewish worker, self-employed, poor, Yiddish-speaking, unassimilated, non-religious, could be anything but socialistic.”

“My parents and grandparents — all of them Jews — went through huge trauma. They went through the trauma of the Holocaust. I don't know if it's for that reason that, by 1965, when I was born, my grandparents, who were alive, my parents were secular. But I've grown up in a secular way. I've thought about this, and I'm an atheist.”

“When I was five, I discovered I couldn't believe in god . . . She never answered my calls! My father was a professional god-botherer, my grandparents were Christians, I was surrounded by standard outer suburban Christianity . . . I wanted to believe, but I just couldn't — I found the whole idea redundant.”

“Believing that we exist only in a single world, the natural world that we share with other living creatures, and that we have no special first-class tickets that allow for travel to continuous existence in other spheres at the end of our journey in this life. In our human distresses, we have only each other to turn to for help.”